When I arrived in Warsaw as the U.S Air Attaché in June 1988, the Communist government had zero credibility with 98% of Polish people. Just two percent of the Polish people belonged to the Communist Party and were the “official believers,” but when the chips were down a year later, they didn’t really believe the government either. During my first week in country, a Polish workman told me, “Don’t believe a word that this government puts out. If the weather forecast predicts hot weather, prepare for a snowstorm.”

In the more than four decades that the Polish communists ruled the country, they had lied to the general public so many times on so many subjects that the Polish communist government eventually fell because the people, including communist party members, just completely lost faith in the party’s ability to govern. While I am not implying that the U.S. Government is going to collapse any time soon because of the never-ending Obama administration lies, the American public’s skepticism resulting from the buffoonish cover-up of the September 11 murders in Libya of the four Americans is eerily similar to the Polish public’s skepticism springing from the Polish government’s unending lies that I experienced in Warsaw during the summer of 1988.

Prior to the al-Qaeda jihadist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, the Obama administration already had a well-documented and -deserved reputation for incompetence and mendacity due to its bumbling economic, fiscal, healthcare, immigration, and foreign policies. So, when Obama attempted to divert attention from his failed “Arab Spring” policy through a -- “look squirrel!” -- type-of-distraction that falsely blamed the consequences of his administration’s ineptitude on something as fanciful as a 13-minute, obscure, amateur, anti-Islam, Internet video trailer, it was no time before already existing public skepticism increased to a highly agitated state, and Obama, plus his government munchkins like Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Jay Carney, were the subjects of ridicule, derision, frustration, and acrimony.

The wizard’s Potemkin curtain was flung wide open as Obama attempted to deceive the American people on September 12th with his baseless blaming of an American citizen for exercising his 1st Amendment free speech right (regardless how stupid), and then skipped his daily intelligence briefing to jet off to Las Vegas in order to raise campaign funds. With that obtuse behavior, Obama solidified the widely held perception of himself as an untrustworthy, unserious man who is the wrong person to be commander-in-chief when the nation is under threat (or at any time for that matter).

In 1988, while I was witnessing the exposure of the Polish communist government as incompetent and contemptible, little did I imagine that just a quarter century later I would be painfully witnessing the same type of shame enveloping my own government.

Col. Thomas Snodgrass, USAF (retired), was an intelligence and an international politico-military affairs officer during a thirty-year military career.